Lunch and the National History Museum

After the Renwick Gallery, I met Chris and Mel for lunch at Farragut Square. There are mobile lunch vendors around the square, and they sell cool food (not just hot dogs like in NYC). I got Mumbai Butter Chicken and rice in a wrap from this vendor:

Chris and Mel enjoying our Picnic

Chris and Me

Then I went to the Museum of Natural History, which is currently my favorite Smithsonian Museum.

I saw a lot of cool things, but here are the three best:

1. The mouth of a Giant Great White Shark. The thing must have been huge! It's pretty scary.

It's too blurry to read, but you can see the scale of the Giant Great White compared to a modern Great White.

2. There is a display about marine life through the ages, and the signs all had this metaphor going about theatre. They described the ages of time as "acts" and talked about the "actors" going extinct and being replaced in the next scene. They took the metaphor way too far, but I totally laughed when I read their description of the rise of marine mammals: "another action/adventure feature, Blazing Paddles". Whoever wrote the descriptions must have had a sense of humor.

3. There was a cool exhibition about some forensic anthropology that's being done in Jamestown. These scientists are digging up the bodies of the ancient settlers and determining things about how they lived, what they ate, and why they died. It reminded me a lot of the tv show Bones, which I liked a lot until the gore and violence got too much for me. But even though I already know some things about forensic anthropology from the show, it was really cool to see the work of real scientists.
I learned that smoking a pipe can actually wear holes in your teeth. Hundreds of years later, these anthropologists can tell who smoked heavily by these holes. They don't show that in the movies. (I'm talking about Gandalf and Bilbo here)

Then I went in the Forensic Anthropology Lab. It seemed to be set up for school groups, but since I was the only one in there, a friendly scientist showed me how to tell the difference between a male and female skeleton from the hip bones. It was pretty cool. If you go to DC and see this exhibit, make sure you go into the Lab. It's all the way at the back and easy to miss, but you get to actually touch the bones!

That's all for today, folks. Tomorrow is all airports, so don't expect much, but in a little under 48 hours, I'll be in Auckland, New Zealand!